“TOTAL SERIALISM”

Chapter:

CHAPTER 1 Starting from Scratch

Source:

MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

That is how the Darmstadt “class of 1951” chose to interpret Messiaen's purpose, at any rate, when he played them his recording
of the piece. Boulez in particular found the work inspiring, not only for the way in which it seemed to integrate “the four
constituents of sound” as he listed them (surely under the influence of Messiaen's “divisions”) in “Schoenberg Is Dead,” but
also for the way in which the whole piece arose out of a set of axioms, or what Messiaen scholar Peter Hill called its “fantastically
detailed set of a priori rules.”33 It promised a new utopia: “total” or “integral” serialism.

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 1 Starting from Scratch. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA.
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